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HP prices Envy x2, its alternative to Microsoft Surface, iPad

Hewlett-Packard announces pricing of its high-end alternative to Microsoft's Surface RT tablet and Apple's iPad.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
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HP's 11.6-inch Envy x2 with it's well-integrated keyboard dock is an alternative to both Microsoft's Surface RT and Apple's iPad, albeit a pricey one.
HP's 11.6-inch Envy x2 with it's well-integrated keyboard dock is an alternative to both Microsoft's Surface RT and Apple's iPad, albeit a pricey one. CNET

Hewlett-Packard has priced its Envy x2 laptop-tablet hybrid at $849.99 -- a small tablet-laptop hybrid that runs the full version of Windows 8.

That price may be high for consumers, but HP is pushing it as a high-quality, high-end "hybrid PC" that effectively straddles both the laptop and tablet paradigms.

It comes with many of the ports found on a PC -- USB, HDMI, SD card slot -- a top-notch IPS display, a full-size keyboard with a large trackpad (what HP calls an Imagepad) for Windows 8 gestures, and a touch display that detaches to become a standalone 11.6-inch Windows 8 tablet.

And the 3.2-pound, all-aluminum device runs Windows 8 on top of Intel's latest power-efficient system-on-a-chip, the Z2760.

That means, of course, that it can run the traditional Microsoft Office suite as well as the millions of older Windows applications. Something, ironically, Microsoft's Surface RT tablet can't do.

HP CEO Meg Whitman, in fact, had some unflattering words for Surface today when speaking at a Gartner conference.

Surface "doesn't function like a laptop" and "lacks a keyboard you can do real work on," according to Whitman, as reported by ZDNet.

Competition for the Envy x2 includes Dell's $649 Latitude 10 -- sold only as a Windows 8 Pro tablet, without a keyboard dock. And Lenovo's ThinkPad Tablet 2, also priced at $649.

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Other Envy x2 features include Beats Audio, an HD Webcam, and an 8-megapixel camera, as well as near field communication (NFC) technology.

It is expected to be available in the United States on November 14.

See HP's press release for pricing and availabilty on all of HP's Windows 8 systems.

Watch this: HP Envy x2